The Haiti Experiment

By Hugh Locke

The Haiti Experiment is Hugh Locke’s fascinating and heartwarming account of his efforts to help the people of this impoverished nation. His principal companion on this journey is hip-hop musician Wyclef Jean. Together they endure triumph, heartbreak, and ultimately trial-by-media for their labors as co-founders of the charitable organization Yéle Haiti. Locke traces the roots of Haiti’s loss of economic power to key events in its history, and offers a revealing and irreverent portrait of the inner workings of global agribusiness and foreign aid. Locke had been accustomed to working with heads of state and royalty, but in Haiti, he negotiates with gangsters in the slums of Port-au-Prince, works with survivors of the tragic 2010 earthquake, and, ultimately, finds inspiration among the country’s farmers for a new approach to humanitarian assistance. Locke concludes with a bold proposal to make Haiti the site of a 10-year experiment aimed at restoring, reforesting and rebuilding the country while pioneering an innovative model for helping the people of the developing world to take charge of their own destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Locke
• Release date: Sep 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780988216327

Book preview

Prologue

HAITI, 2005. Bright morning sunlight glinted harshly off the rolls of barbed wire topping the barricades on either side of the road as we entered the notorious slum of Cité Soleil, deep in the heart of Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince.

Suspicious, youthful eyes peered at us above bandana masks, the wearers’ bravado pumped up by the guns they casually, but deliberately, brandished. They had been instructed to let the four men in our red car enter without shooting at us. Happily, all seemed to have got the message. Inside the car with me were three of my Haitian employees, who went by the names of Riro, Jimmy O, and Beaudy. We were all nervous but quiet as we passed through the barricades and followed a masked man on a motorcycle who was to guide us to our destination.

We were on our way to meet Amaral Duclona, the infamous gang leader, known throughout the country by his first name—the most wanted man in Haiti. His bloody reign of terror had kept the police and UN peacekeepers out of Cité Soleil and rival gangs at bay. I was meeting with him to negotiate terms for allowing Yéle Haiti—the organization I had co-founded earlier that year with musicians Wyclef Jean and Jerry Duplessis—to continue bringing in free rice for the local residents who were suffering for lack of food.

We reached Amaral’s compound and were escorted into a courtyard. As we entered, about a dozen teenagers toting machine guns were chatting or leaning against the courtyard walls. One of them informed us that Amaral would come out shortly. With dark clothes, sunglasses and wool caps they were clearly intending to look tough, an image not quite matching their youthful appearance.

My long training in protocol, honed over many years by contact with various royal families and a considerable number of heads of state, suppressed any fear that might reasonably have guided my actions. Without thinking, I immediately went around the courtyard and shook hands with each gang member, being sure to make eye contact in the process. My Yéle colleagues chose not to follow my lead and looked on in stunned silence. An interesting detail: holding a machine gun requires both hands, something I quickly realized when each of the gang members had to set down his gun in order to respond to my gesture. A small but useful addition to my protocol experience.

Amaral emerged and greeted me and my colleagues. He was just under six feet tall, rather pudgy, with very dark, pock-marked skin, short hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. I have to admit that I was intrigued to meet someone who was, by action and reputation, the very incarnation of pure evil, who held sway over so many thousands of people. Physically, he did not look the part, but when he began to speak, he exuded both power and charisma.

The meeting with Amaral had been set up from New York by Wyclef Jean, Yéle’s co-founder, and one of the few people at that time with the moral authority to reach out to those on all sides of the conflict that had paralyzed Haiti. I knew that Wyclef had spoken by phone in advance with Amaral, but the latter was clearly surprised when we met. It had been arranged that I would call Wyclef on my cell phone. The connection went through and I handed the phone to Amaral. I only learned later that Wyclef had neglected to tell Amaral in advance that I was white. So his first thought on meeting me was that I could not possibly be representing Wyclef, and might even be part of a plot by the UN to capture him. Thankfully, Wyclef was able to convince him that I was, indeed, his trusted representative. I shudder to think what might have happened if cell phone reception had been bad at that moment.

Having established my credentials, I ended the phone conversation with Wyclef. From that moment on, it was just Amaral and me, with Riro serving as interpreter. Beaudy and Jimmy O stayed in the background and took no part in the negotiations. I acknowledged that Yéle was coming into Amaral’s territory to deliver free food and expressed gratitude that he was allowing us safe passage. I expressed the hope that this would continue, and then got to the heart of the matter: negotiating the percentage of food that would be given to Amaral to feed his and other gangs. Until that time, we had no formal arrangement with the gangs for any percentage, but had simply given them a few bags of rice from time to time. However, several incidents had alerted us to the need for an understanding in order to continue the operation. After some back and forth, we finally agreed on 15 percent, and shook hands to seal the bargain. This was within the terms I had previously agreed to with the World Food Programme, which provided the rice. And it was considered by all an acceptable cost to be able to continue distributing food in Cité Soleil, since Yéle was the only organization able to get through the barricades at that point.

I thought things were going well and that it was now time to take up the second part of my mission: to explain our plan to have only women receive the food that Yéle was to distribute. Amaral did not take to this idea well at all. In fact, he shook his fist in the air and began shouting, asking me why I would do something so stupid. Two competing thoughts occurred to me at that moment: first, the man has guns; and second, that he would probably respect me more if I stuck to my principles. So I calmly explained that we felt women were more responsible when it came to making sure their families got the food, whereas men were often inclined to sell it. Having stated my case, I then thought it wise to formulate an exit strategy. To this end, I suggested we had probably reached the point where we could agree to disagree on the role of women in food distribution, particularly as I was not asking him to get involved directly in that activity. He smiled and became cordial again.

We said our goodbyes. I got back in the car with my silent colleagues and we headed out. It was only after we passed through the barricades that I phoned my wife, April. I had not told her in advance that I was going to Cité Soleil that day, for fear she would worry. But now I was able to relay the news that the visit had been successful and that I was alive and all in one piece.

Introduction

USA, 2012. The deluge of media-generated images of Haitian people in recent years seems to have coalesced to form a single impression, rather like a Chuck Close photorealist portrait consisting of thousands of smaller individual faces. We see a Haitian face distorted by fear, rage, and suffering, and, on closer inspection, the thousands of individual faces in the portrait portray similar emotions.

Although I have seen many such images over the course of seven and a half years of humanitarian service in Haiti, they are vastly outnumbered by faces expressing fortitude, determination, and joy. My experience there has yielded a very different portrait of Haiti and its people, one that I am honored to be able to share.

My introduction to the country was through two musicians, Wyclef Jean and Jerry Duplessis, with whom I worked to create a charitable organization called Yéle Haiti.

When I began travelling there in late 2004, it was as if the entire country of close to ten million people, living in an area slightly smaller than Belgium, existed in a parallel universe in which poverty, corruption, violence, and hopelessness were the norm. I could move in and out of this universe as easily as a three-and-a-half-hour flight from New York City. But while in Haiti, the most I could do was to help a few individuals and families beat the odds and improve their living conditions.

During that initial period, I was acutely conscious of a set of statistics that served as a kind of protective mantra. Taken together and repeated in sequence, it went something like this: Haiti is the poorest and most densely populated country in the Western hemisphere. Eighty percent of the population is below the poverty line, while 54 percent live in extreme poverty. Every year, Haiti ranks as one of the worst failed states in the world. It is always near the top of the annual list of the most corrupt countries. It is regularly identified as having the second largest income gap between the very rich and the very poor in the world. Unemployment is running at more than 50 percent. The list goes on.

But this statistical interpretation of Haiti is does not reflect the people I met and worked with, who are diligent, resourceful, happy, even optimistic. How could Haiti have become one of the most damaged societies on earth? Why could they not organize themselves as a nation to correct the situation? And how could billions of dollars in foreign aid pour into the country every year and not result in significant and tangible improvement?

Haiti holds a kind of enchantment that is hard to explain, unless you have experienced it yourself. I found myself drawn to the country by a kind of ephemeral and beckoning presence from somewhere beyond the statistics. I started to focus less on the sorrow and began a quest to gain deeper insight into the soul of the country. I asked questions of people from all walks of life everywhere I went. I also started researching the country’s history and customs.

What began for me as humanitarian service with Yéle took on a wider dimension. I came to realize that Haiti is a textbook case for understanding the nature and impact of development assistance as a whole. In many ways, Haiti resembles other developing nations that receive money from richer countries and benefit from the operations of the financial institutions those rich countries fund, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank. But Haiti is the canary in the mineshaft when it comes to the challenges faced by developing countries, whether it is deforestation, colonial oppression, political instability, corruption, hurricanes, earthquakes, or the dark side of development aid that started flowing from richer nations in the early 1960s. It seems that the impact is often disproportionally felt in this beleaguered nation.

My goal in sharing what I learned about development is not to engage in polemics, but rather to try and understand the process in sufficient depth to be able to suggest ways in which it might be improved, not only for the benefit of Haiti.

The bottom line in development aid is that when a rich country gives money to a poor one, there are always strings attached. There is no such thing as pure altruism when it comes to development assistance. This is not unreasonable, depending upon the nature of the strings. Even when dealing with humanitarian aid in response to natural disasters, there are often conditions, although they tend to be less stringent. The simple fact is that the bulk of development funding is tied to the political, military, and commercial interests of the donor country.

My premise in this book is that the entire mechanism for delivering development aid has evolved over time into a bureaucratic and fragmented system that is no longer effective in meeting the objectives of the donors, let alone the recipients. Development funds are meted out in discrete chunks for specific projects which are not viewed in holistic terms by either donor or recipient. Donor countries often send in their own companies, non-profit organizations, experts, and suppliers to implement projects which are one-off in nature and not part of a comprehensive, multi-year national strategy. Thus, a school is not part of an education strategy; a bridge is not part of a national public works plan; a training program for farmers is not part of a broader agricultural initiative; solar panels are not integrated into the national energy grid, and so on. A given project may have a life of two or three years, almost never beyond the term of office of the government of the donor country. And when the funding stops, the project often collapses, either because it cannot be maintained, or because no one knows how, or has the will, to find the new leadership and funding necessary to sustain it. The recipient country has usually had a minimal role in implementing the project in the first place, and so has not benefited by building the domestic capacity in industry, professional services, management, or government oversight that would allow it to continue the project that has been initiated.

Put more simply, development aid is both sides of a carrot-and-stick approach: the carrot is money for projects, in return for specified policies and actions on the part of the recipient government; the stick is the threat of withdrawal of that money by the donor country, if those policies and actions are not followed.

What I observed in the development system as it now operates, both internationally and in Haiti, is not only incredibly inefficient, but lacks an impact commensurate with the vast sums of money being spent to improve the lives of poor and disenfranchised people. It is equally inefficient in meeting the range of strategic needs of the donor countries. The world has become too complex and interconnected for the simplistic carrot-and-stick system to work.

I would go even further to say that the current overall levels of development funding from donor countries—were the funds to be used more efficiently and in full partnership with the recipient nations—could be reduced by as much as a third and still have a significantly greater impact than at their previous levels.

Over the past decade or so, there have been many calls for a change in development assistance, including the need for ownership of the development process by recipient nations. Donor governments, including the United States, have been enthusiastic in expressing their support for this concept. But it is nowhere to be seen in action and lives only at conferences, summits, and high-level retreats. In order for it to work, there needs to be an entirely new model for delivering aid. Tweaks to the existing system will not have much effect, because the system itself is based on principles that have long outlived their usefulness. We must progress further than the development equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. What is needed now is a way to experiment with a new system for delivering aid that learns from the past, both from what works and what does not, and incorporates all the checks and balances needed to protect the interests of both funders and recipients as more equal partners in development.

Haiti is the perfect place for this experiment: a country where the ranking on just about every index of individual, family, community well-being, and government efficiency is about the lowest in the world. For once, this is an advantage. If an experiment in changing the way development aid is delivered can succeed here, it could succeed just about anywhere in the world. And Haiti is a small enough country that the experiment would be manageable, the outputs measurable, and the lessons extractable.

This book weaves together several themes. It begins with a short history of Haiti, because this background is key to putting my own story in context, and to understanding the country’s current problems. To this is added, from late 2004 onwards, a narrative of my own direct experience in providing humanitarian assistance in Haiti as events unfolded around me. This includes going into the gang-controlled slum of Cité Soleil to deliver food in 2006; supporting a wide range of education services in various parts of the country; helping with the aftermath of the food riots in Port-au-Prince in 2008; overseeing emergency services to around 80,000 of the victims of the January 2010 earthquake—including employing up to 2,000 people at a time from the tent camps; and helping to support the first responders to the cholera outbreak in late 2010.

Over these seven and a half years, it is the experience of working with small-scale farmers that has had the greatest impact in shaping my views of Haiti and development assistance. These farmers represent a significant and untapped potential for reversing the fortunes of the country. With the support and active engagement of The Timberland Company, I led a team that created a community-managed agroforestry program that now generates one million trees a year and has increased the agricultural output of 2,000 participating farmers by as much as 40 percent.

Even though Haiti went from being mostly self-sufficient in food production in the mid-1980s to importing close to 60 percent of what its people now consume, small-scale or smallholder farming is still the main source of income for two-thirds of Haiti’s working population. We developed a simple system that combines tree planting with an agricultural service to improve food crops, building on the farmers’ own long history of intensive small-plot agriculture. And now, the most disadvantaged people in one of the most disadvantaged countries in the world are defying the odds, as they transform their own lives and that of their communities. The results are not only gratifying, but embody practical lessons for Haiti and the rural poor around the world.

In recounting my own work in the fields of education, agriculture, health, and various aspects of emergency assistance—six years with Yéle Haiti and a year and a half with smallholder farmers—I will also share the insights that have led to my current, and admittedly somewhat radical, proposal regarding the changes needed in the field of development assistance. These recommendations come together in the fifth and final chapter, in which I propose Haiti as the subject of a ten-year experiment for exploring a new methodology for delivering development aid that will be of benefit to the entire world—if it succeeds. And if it does not succeed, Haiti is still worthy of having the opportunity to change a destiny that has been handicapped by monumental forces, both internal and external, from the moment its heroic slave revolt launched a new nation in 1804.

I first visited Haiti two centuries later, in November 2004. Two important statistics about the country were added to my list at that time: there were up to fifteen kidnappings a week and the bodies of three or four of those murdered during the night were frequently on display the next day by the side of the main airport road. I confirmed that my life insurance policy was up to date, that my wife knew where to find my will… and began my odyssey.

1

A SHORT HISTORY OF HAITI:

How It Went From Being One of the Richest Countries in the World to One of the Poorest

AYITI, 1492. In telling my own story, I feel I must begin by sharing what I learned of Haiti’s history, because it influenced everything I did and continue to do there. I want to assure the reader that this account is not intended to replace the much more comprehensive and better informed works of writers such as Laurent Dubois, Jean Casimir, Jeremy Popkin, Paul Farmer and others. What I am sharing here is more akin to a humanitarian hitchhiker’s guide to the universe of Haiti.

The tale begins in 1492, with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on an island inhabited by the indigenous Taino peoples. These local inhabitants called the place Ayiti (pronounced eye-ee-tee). Columbus ignored them, claimed the island for Spain, and gave it the Latin name of Hispaniola. With the subsequent arrival of more Europeans, the Taino people, ill treated and enslaved by the settlers, succumbed to new diseases and soon became extinct.

Before their disappearance, the Taino taught settlers their method for preserving meat and fish by smoking it on a wooden frame mounted several feet above an open fire. The frame was made of green wood so that it would not burn. Their word for this sounded like barbacoa, according to one Spanish explorer who could only report the phonetic translation because the Taino had no written language. While the etymology of the word is not definitive, the modern word barbeque is thought to have evolved from barbacoa.

Pirates, buccaneers, and slaves

When it became clear there was no gold to be mined, Spain’s interest in Hispaniola started to wane and the island began to attract a range of pirates and buccaneers who established bases there. Pirates were freelance operators who attacked ships flying any flag and kept all their plunder. Buccaneers, on the other hand, were specialized pirates, who attacked mostly Spanish ships and were usually sanctioned by either France or Britain. The sanctioning country received a percentage of the buccaneers’ plunder, making them a sort of self-financed and income-generating private-sector naval attack force. Here again, the origin of the name buccaneer is likely to have come from the French term boucan, referring to the device which these pirates (boucaniers) used to smoke their meat.

Soon the French and British governments decided that controlling some or all of the island would allow them to get rid of the non-buccaneer pirates who were disrupting their shipping in the region. Both countries made attempts to take it over from the Spanish. France won the day and in 1664, seized control of the western portion of the island and signed a